The cost of materials and of the transcription of books added immensely to their appraised valuation in the different ages. We quote from a volume by Mr. Geo. H. Putnam concerning books and their making in pre-Christian times: "It appears from such references as we find to the prices paid that, as compared with other luxuries, books remained very costly up to the time of the Roman occupation of Greece, or about 150 B. C. ... Plato is reported to have paid for three books of Philolaüs, which Dion bought for him in Sicily, three Attic talents, equal in our currency to $3,240,--and the equivalent, of course, of a much larger sum, estimated in its purchasing power for food.... The cost of books depended, of course, largely upon the cost of papyrus, for which Greece was dependent upon Egypt. An inscription of the year 407 B. C., quoted by Rangabé, gives the price of a sheet of papyrus at one drachma and two oboli, the equivalent of about twenty-five cents."[14] Ptolemy Philadelphus is said to have authorized the giving of fifteen talents of silver, the equivalent of about $16,200, in addition to a shipment of corn, to the famishing Athenians for certain authenticated copies of the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for the Alexandrian Library. (Putnam.) And, later, in the early part of the Christian Era, the price of copying books was estimated by the number of lines they contained. Diocletian, it is said, fixed the wage of the copyers of his time at forty _denarii_ or at about twenty-five cents per one hundred lines. Late in the thirteenth century, the price of transcribing a Bible containing a commentary thereon, written in a fair hand, ranged from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars, though earlier in that century the purchasing power of money was so great and labor so cheap that two arches of London Bridge were built for the equivalent of a hundred and twenty-five dollars, or less than the cost of transcribing a Bible with a commentary. In 1272 the wages of a laboring-man were less than four cents a day, while the price of a Bible at that time was about one hundred and eighty dollars. (The Book Record.) In other words, a common laborer must then have toiled for thirteen years, according to the current labor values of the time, in order to secure the purchase-price of a Bible; though in an age when few could read, this was not so large a deprivation. Now, the American Bible Society can furnish the entire Christian scriptures, creditably bound in cloth with fair and readable type, for less than twenty-five cents. A common laborer, who generally has a rudimentary education at least, can now secure the Bible at the purchase-price of two hours' toil, or the New Testament for less than a half-hour's toil; and, what is more, the common laborer can, in most instances, not only read the Bible but has the respite from excessive labor to do so. IV THE AMPLITUDE OF THE BIBLE IN MANUSCRIPT